


Almost Stanley

by orphan_account



Category: due South
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, Post-Call of the Wild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-09
Updated: 2013-02-09
Packaged: 2017-11-28 16:56:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/676719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While on the Quest, Ray decides he really is a Ray, not a Stanley, and also maybe some other aspects of his life need to be re-evaluated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Almost Stanley

**Author's Note:**

> I've always kind of wondered about the end of "Call of the Wild," when Fraser can't seem to make up his mind about whether Kowalski is Stanley or Ray. This is how I ended up investigating that.

_And as for Ray, or should I say Stanley Kowalski...we set off, Ray and I, on an adventure..._

“My marriage was not a lie!” It was a non sequitur, but that has always been a legitimate, even vital part of Ray Kowalski’s rhetorical repertoire. I once asked him to explain why he shouted “Dolphin Boy” on that disastrous plane ride just before we disastrously jumped out of the disastrous plane and landed on a non-disastrous duvet of snow.

He had looked at me as if my elevator should have at least reached my adam’s apple but had somehow failed to do so. “Look, my hands were tied behind my back. I didn’t have lots of resources there, so I was seeking the psychological advantage. If I could’ve just convinced them I’d been raised by dolphins, they would have cowered in terror ‘cause they’d think I had truly fearsome head-butting powers.”

Put like that, it was downright logical. But this exclamation about his marriage was not something I could parse unaided.

“Did I say that it was?” I asked mildly.

“No,” Ray admitted belligerently. “But I’m, you know, re-evaluating. And I said that I was a con job, that I got Stella by pretending that an accident was deliberate. That I was a hero.”

That again. I suppose I should have been patient. After all, re-evaluation or at least some kind of self-evaluation, was the purpose of our quest. He even had me call him Stanley, which lasted about three days before he decided that he really is a Ray after all.

“I’m reasonably certain that we’ve covered this territory before,” I said.

“You covered it,” Ray said, his tone less combative. “I’ve still been struggling with it. In light of certain developments.”

“What developments would those be, Ray?” I asked.

“I re-evaluated our friendship,” Ray said, stabbing at the snow with a stick and not looking at me or even in my general direction. Not that I cared too much about where he was looking, since I was busy trying to assess the sudden cramp in my stomach, the way I felt like I’d been punched in the throat and why my heart was suddenly racing.

“I see,” I prompted as neutrally as possible.

“And, looking back, it doesn’t look like friendship so much as I thought it did.” _Dear Lord,_ I thought, _is he really going to do this on the ice?_ We had at least two days hard going to the next town and if he’d suddenly decided that our friendship was in some way fraudulent and, as limited as he apparently now believed it to be, at an end….

It would be a very long two days.

“Yeah. I look back at our friendship and what I really see is…I guess _you’d_ call it courtship.”

Oh, dear. “Well, certainly courtship rituals around the world are highly….”

“Can it, Fraser,” Ray said abruptly. Since I really had no idea how that sentence was going to end, I followed his directive.

Ray poked at the snow a little bit more. “I think you were after me for more than friends,” he said.

“I had entertained hopes in that direction,” I confessed. “But it really seemed that being your friend was a more viable, and for that matter, more valuable endeavor.”

“See, this is where I’ve gotta force myself to disagree,” Ray said. “Firstly, that you stopped courting me at some point. Secondly, that friendship was the best end game you had to play for.”

“Oh,” I said. It seemed nicely neutral. Since Ray was confessing my sins to me, maybe he’d offer some of his own.

“And, now that I’ve realized you’ve been putting the make on me since day one,” Ray said, and I didn’t try to correct him by pointing out that the courtship, which I would argue he initiated, probably started closer to day seven.

“The thing is,” Ray continued, his voice getting as soft as it could be without being drowned out by the ambient noise of the far north, “I was into it. Am into it.”

“Ah,” I said. It seemed nicely relieved.

“But just because I’m thinking I might like it if I am being _courted_ by you, a fellow man, does not mean my marriage was a lie!” Ray was back to exclaiming, or perhaps declaiming.

“Of course it wasn’t,” I said robustly. “Your feelings for ASA Kowalski, and hers for you, were genuine.”

“Damn straight,” Ray said, emphasizing his point by tossing his stick aside forcefully.

“But does her current love for Ray Vecchio make your marriage a lie?” I asked him. “From her perspective?”

“I can’t speak about Stella’s perspective,” Ray said glumly. “That ended up being kind of an issue: the times I’d think I was speaking about Stella’s perspective and was totally wrong about it, and the times I didn’t figure out her perspective at all…bad news either way.”

“Try,” I encouraged him.

He thought long and hard about it. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “I think she’d say our marriage was pretty good, even if it was another time, another place.”

“It's over now, she learned a lot, it’s not a waste?” I suggested.

“Did you just quote Al Stewart at me?” Ray asked, all too ready to derail the conversation.

“Did you just admit that you recognized that I quoted Al Stewart at you?” I returned.

“Right,” Ray said. I had a feeling that would make him change the subject quickly. Perhaps he would even return to what we had been discussing. “So, no, I guess that she’s with Vecchio now…that does not suggest to me that she hated every minute of our married life. Or even most of the minutes.”

“Well, there you have it.”

“But Vecchio’s a man,” Ray protested. “Stella fell in love with another man, so she wasn’t faking that she liked it that I was a man. Now I’m falling in love with another man, it’s different because maybe people would think I was faking it when I was married to a woman.”

 _Now I’m falling in love with another man..._. I gathered his words in close to my heart, made a place where they could live forever.

“Some people might think that,” I said cautiously because I certainly would never want to lie to him. “But, as long as we’re together, you know what those people can do?”

Ray looked at me then, looked at me as though perhaps he was gathering some of the words I just said to him close to his heart. “What, Ben?”

“Fuck off. Those people can just fuck off,” I told him. Ray laughed out loud and so did I.

That was nearly fourteen years ago. Some of those people did fuck off indeed, but many did not. I try not to be too uncharitable in my happiness with Ray, but I hope those people who did think that his love for me somehow negated his previous marriage somehow magically know how happy we make each other, every day.


End file.
